Texas Redistricting Quorum Flight Time Warp!

Posted on by Josh Marshall

With Texas Democrats fleeing the state to prevent the quorum state Republicans need to ultra-gerrymander their state, I’m surprised there isn’t more mention on how the exact same thing happened 22 years ago when Texas legislators did the exact same thing. This all happened back in early 2003. More than a few of you will remember this. But it’s more than a bit of interesting trivia. Because the circumstances of that earlier example are a key, though semi-forgotten, step in understanding how we arrived where we are today.

Twenty-two years ago, mid-decade redistricting was unheard of. There was, as we say now, a very strong norm against it. The U.S. Census comes out every decade and then congressional seats are redistricted for the next election. That created regularity and prevented the chaos and gamesmanship of state legislatures rushing to redistrict at every moment of partisan advantage.

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So What Happens With the Jobs Numbers Now?

Posted on by Josh Marshall

In that interval of a few hours between the release of the Friday jobs report and President Trump’s decision to fire of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I had a few people ask me whether I thought it was possible that the books for May and June had initially been “cooked,” since they ended up being revised dramatically downward. That question seemed a bit quaint after the subsequent firing of Erika McEntarfer. But the answer I gave is relevant in a few ways to the situation going forward.

What I said was that in the Trump era we can’t really rule anything out. (More than cooking, I noted just a few days ago that DOGE-cuts have forced BLS to rely more on estimates relative to data collection in its inflation calculations.) But we should go in with a strong assumption that that is not the case — that there isn’t any cooking — for a number of important reasons.

For me, trust figures very little into this judgment. The first of those reasons is that it would simply be very hard to do. BLS is staffed by career government economists and statisticians, very apolitical people in their work, who are just not the kind of people who are going to go along with anything like that. To the extent they were ordered to do so or Trump found a compliant statistician willing to cook for him, that fact would almost certainly leak out in short order, either through leaks to the press or people resigning.

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Trump Breaks His Campaign Promise to Fund IVF

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Trump’s IVF Flip-Flop a Sign of His Continued Reliance on Christian Right

President Donald Trump is no longer planning to require the government or insurance carriers to cover the cost of in vitro fertilization, the Washington Post reports, despite having promised during the 2024 campaign he would do so. 

The promise was part of his campaign’s effort — much like Trump’s supposed “distancing” from Project 2025 — to paint Christian nationalists’ revered candidate as far more moderate than his extreme anti-abortion base. The move came in the aftermath of a February 2024 Alabama Supreme Court decision holding that frozen embryos created by IVF are considered “children” under a 19th century state law and a 2018 state constitutional amendment banning abortion. That stunning decision meant anyone involved in destroying a frozen embryo in the state could potentially be liable for wrongful death. 

This judicial embrace of the concept of “personhood” (and therefore rights) for fertilized eggs, or “extrauterine children,” as the court referred to them, jolted even the deep red Alabama legislature. Lawmakers then passed a law granting IVF patients and providers immunity, although they left the question of personhood unaddressed.

Throughout 2024, Trump’s campaign presented him to the press and wider public as a supporter of IVF, even as he unabashedly aligned himself with anti-abortion radicals and IVF opponents. Now, as Trump is facing declining approval numbers, he seems to be turning to his most reliable supporters for a little boost.

With MAGA influencers in turmoil over the Epstein files and even Trump’s position on the war in Gaza, he needs to keep his most dependable bloc of support — the Christian right — close at hand. If there’s anything he could do right now that would roil Christian nationalists, it would be using government power to make IVF, which they consider to be immoral meddling with divine plans for humanity, more widely available.

To anyone who might have believed a government subsidy for their fertility treatments was in the offing, anonymous administration officials tell the Post this laughable doozy of an excuse:

A senior administration official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks, said that while expanding IVF access remains a “huge priority” for Trump, the president can’t legally make IVF an essential health benefit without Congress first approving legislation to do so. It is unclear whether the administration plans to ask lawmakers to take up a bill, but the two people said that forcing insurance companies to cover IVF is not currently on the table.

Cracks in Trump’s Inner Circle

Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng reports that Trump’s ham-fisted efforts to change the subject from Epstein by threatening to prosecute former President Barack Obama for treason are “doing next to nothing right now to dig the president out of this Epstein-shaped hole that he and his loyalists dug for themselves.” Instead, they are worried that it is massively backfiring. 

Trump’s bungling of the Epstein situation by refusing to release the files that he knows include mentions of his name has MAGA influencers up in arms, and has drawn wider public disfavor. It is not going away, no matter how flamboyantly Trump tries to deflect it. Now, according to Suebsaeng’s reporting, people close to Trump are admitting that his impulsive, rake-stepping reactions are a disaster for him. 

MAGA’s entire disappointment with the Epstein files is that they expected their hero Trump to expose the supposed deep state by releasing all the documentation of its nefarious inner workings. His attempts at misdirection have prompted a dismissive reaction. One administration official told Suebsaeng “people aren’t buying it,” after receiving “messages from high-profile Trump allies and MAGA-aligned influencers insisting that this ‘Obamagate’ reboot will not get them to move on from Epstein.”

Ooops

To further distract from the Epstein debacle, Trump and administration officials have attempted to resurrect bogus claims that the Russia investigation was a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” of Trump, engineered by Hillary Clinton. Last week, FBI Director Kash Patel tried to claim an “annex” to the investigation of former Special Counsel John Durham contained evidence “that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.” But the New York Times reports the annex “shows the opposite,” because the supposed evidence of a Clinton campaign plot was “almost certainly a product of Russian disinformation,” a conclusion Durham sought to bury in the “annex.” 

You read that right. The annex had been in the deep freeze until the Trump administration dug it out, only to have it disprove the very claim it had released the annex to prove.

Will We Ever See How Trump Appears in the Epstein Files?

Freedom of Information Act expert Jason Leopold has stunning details about how Trump’s name ended up getting redacted from the massive trove of Epstein documents reviewed by a team of a thousand employees at the FBI. According to Leopold’s sources, the rationale for the redaction was that during the time period covered by the files, Trump was a private citizen and therefore subject to FOIA’s privacy exemptions. That’s a standard FOIA procedure supported by the law, Leopold explains, although it is directly at odds with the administration’s promises of maximum transparency. 

After the review was finished, the Department of Justice and FBI reversed course and announced they would not be releasing the Epstein files after all. 

Leopold concludes that overcoming a privacy-based FOIA redaction is “a really high bar.” Of course if Trump were maximally transparent as he claims, he could order the files’ release without his name redacted. Otherwise the public will likely have to wait until after he is dead to see how he is mentioned.

DOJ Flailing to Deny 3,000-A-Day Deportation Quota Stephen Miller Bragged About

Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has gone on television to boast of an administration goal of deporting 3,000 undocumented immigrants a day. Now that some trial courts have ruled that its detention methods are illegal, DOJ is trying to claim the quota doesn’t exist. In a court filing to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week, “DOJ attorney Yaakov Roth attributed the quota claim to ‘anonymous reports in the newspapers,’” Politico reports. 

House Republicans Now Panicking Trump’s Deportations Will Hurt Them in 2026

Latino members of the House GOP are desperately signalling to Trump and Miller that their mass deportations will hurt them with voters that they won over in 2024. “President Trump, sir, the same God who saved you from death in Pennsylvania one year ago and who put you back in the Oval Office against all odds, is the same God Almighty who millions and millions are begging to for some type of dignity, not amnesty,” said Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL), as she introduced a bill to provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers (immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children), and protected status for some other undocumented immigrants.

Democratic Lawmakers Flee Texas 

With shrinking options, Democrats are attempting to deprive Republicans of a quorum to vote today on their proposed gerrymandered Congressional maps by leaving the state. Governor Greg Abbott has now threatened to remove them from office.

Not Just Eggs

A new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds “the vast majority of U.S. adults are at least somewhat stressed about the cost of groceries.”

Tell Me Again About Trump’s Brilliant Outreach to Influential Podcasters

After Charlamagne Tha God criticized Trump on his daughter-in-law Lara Trump’s Fox News program, Trump called him a “dope” and a “racist sleazebag.”

Trump Also Ruined Summer Vacation

Tourism and vacations are down this year, thanks to consumers opting for budget travel due to economic concerns amid tariff uncertainty, and foreign travelers repelled by Trump’s xenophobic policies. 

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Texas Starts a Nationwide Gerrymandering War

Posted on by John Light

When the Republican-controlled Texas legislature, at Donald Trump’s urging, first pushed through a plan to do a highly unusual mid-decade redistricting, Democrats hoped they might overplay their hand — that in carving up Democratic-held districts on what is an already heavily gerrymandered map, they would be unable to avoid diluting Republican districts, making them more winnable for Democrats. 

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Experts Say Foreign Governments Are ‘Playing Trump’ on Tariffs

Posted on by Layla A. Jones

President Donald Trump on Thursday night signed an executive order applying blanket tariffs to scores of countries. In announcing tariffs ranging from 10% to 41% levied against around 70 countries, Trump began a new chapter in a volatile, months-long saga that reached a fever pitch over the last couple weeks, during which he also announced hundreds of billions of dollars worth of so-called trade deals with the United Kingdom, Japan, Indonesia, the European Union, and South Korea, among others.

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Trump Relocates Ghislaine to Texas Club Fed as Negotiations Continue

Posted on by Josh Marshall

Going back to my Backchannel on not being surprised when President Trump pardons Ghislaine Maxwell … Trump has now moved her from her Florida prison to a Texas “club Fed” prison camp (Camp Bryan) near Houston, a low-security facility which currently houses prisoners like disgraced Theranos chief Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Star Jen Shah.

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Inertia, Rage and Netanyahu’s Never-Ending War

Posted on by Josh Marshall

While we watch the horrific and increasingly senseless immiseration of the civilian population of Gaza, it’s important to look clearly at why it’s happening. “Why” may be too big a question. It may be better to try to answer not that big “why” but, in a more focused and discrete way, why this war hasn’t stopped. Prime Minister Netanyahu has managed to lose even President Trump now on the question of whether people are starving in Gaza. More significantly, Netanyahu some time ago lost even fairly hardcore Israeli hawks who are not members of his governing coalition on why the war is still going on at all.

You’ll remember that for about a year, between 2021 and 2022, Netanyahu was actually out of power and Naftali Bennett was Prime Minister. Bennett is from the “religious Zionist” world and political camp, and from almost every perspective that’s a very right-wing and nationalist world. But he was heading a coalition of basically every part of the Israeli political world which wasn’t behind Netanyahu. That stretched all the way from his own religious Zionist political party right through the center and left of Israeli politics, such as it is, and all the way to one of the Arab Islamist parties. A few weeks ago Bennett said again: we need to end this. Stop the war. Get the hostages home. We’re not going to have a final victory over Hamas. It would be great if we could, but that’s not going to happen. Leave that for another day.

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Senate Democrats Estimate DOGE Caused Billions of Dollars In Government Waste

Posted on by Allegra Kirkland

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

What DOGE Cost Us

Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations yesterday released a jaw-dropping report attempting to document the scope and scale of financial waste, personnel upheaval, and human suffering caused by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk’s giddily uninformed strike force of Peter Thiel acolytes. In all, the Democrats, led by Richard Blumenthal (CT), estimated DOGE cost the government $21.7 billion. 

“DOGE-generated waste could also have easily funded monthly food assistance for the 5.3 million families losing an average of $146 in monthly food security assistance ($9.3 billion per year) under the new budget; or it could have been used more broadly to support the 40 percent of taxpayers that will see a net increase to their taxes as a direct result of the Trump tax plan,” the report contends.

Major news coverage focused on the cost of the government paying over 150,000 federal workers who accepted the Trump administration’s deferred resignation incentives, under which they had to stop working but are continuing to be paid through September or even December. The minority’s report, which estimated that 200,000 workers took these buyouts, calculated that paying workers for not working cost the government $14.8 billion.

Neither the buyouts nor paying workers while on administrative leave (costing an additional $6.1 billion) increased government efficiency, as was always obvious and predictable. The report details many other costs, from the petty and pointless (millions of hours of wasted employee time writing the Musk-required email listing their weekly accomplishments) to the catastrophic (the elimination of the United States Agency for International Development, “projected to cause millions of additional deaths globally while simultaneously endangering domestic public health by reducing essential medical staff and programs.”)

As it rampaged through the government, DOGE destroyed valuable assets, wasting money already set aside to be spent, or depriving the government of income-generating programs. Product spoilage of USAID supplies of food and medicines cost the government nearly $10 million. DOGE’s elimination of the Internal Revenue Service’s Direct File program, the report estimates, wasted a more than $33 million investment in it, not to mention that taxpayers no longer have a free electronic filing option. DOGE caused the loss of more than $263 million of interest and fee income by shutting down Department of Energy loans from a program to modernize the electricity grid. The actual cost of the mass cancellations of medical research grants at the National Institutes of Health has yet to be fully calculated.

This summary represents a fraction of the entire report, and much is still not even known about the scope of the DOGE destruction. Yesterday, Blumenthal wrote to the inspectors general at 27 agencies, requesting they “initiate a comprehensive review of DOGE’s activities within your agency in order to determine the full scope of costs that DOGE’s careless actions have imposed,” particularly “the financial impact of the reorganization of federal agencies through mass layoffs, the canceling of grants, contracts, and other projects for partisan reasons, and the stifling of income-generating activities.” 

Is MAGA Turning on Trump over Israel?

I spotted two stories this week in the inside-the-Beltway press, one in Politico and the other in Axios, suggesting MAGA is turning on Trump because of his continued support of the Netanyahu regime and its assault on Gaza that even Israeli human rights organizations have called a genocide. The Axios piece even suggests a “GOP realignment” on the issue may be underway. The Politico piece is more measured on that possibility, but neither piece mentions the critical role of Christian Zionists — that is, evangelicals who vigorously support Israel’s far right, like Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — in the Trump coalition.

It is hard to know now this possible coalitional split will play out. In the meantime, can we talk about how the MAGA figures turning against Israel are saying things that have gotten foreign students detained and universities’ funding cut off?

Federal Trial Judges Speak Out About Violent Threats, Fueled by Trump Tirades 

At a panel discussion hosted by Speak up for Justice, a group advocating for the safety of an independent judiciary, federal judges who have ruled against the Trump administration described the violent threats they and family members have received as a result. Judge Esther Salas, a federal judge in New Jersey whose son was murdered by a litigant in 2020, described the increase in threats as Trump has escalated his invectives against the bench. “I’ve often referred to it as a bonfire that I believe the current administration is throwing accelerants on,” Salas told the Associated Press.

D.C. Bar Panel Recommends Disbarment of Jeffrey Clark, Who Promoted Overturning 2020 Election

The D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility singled out his dishonesty as the core reason for recommending the most severe punishment for Clark:

Respondent was prepared to cause the Justice Department to tell a lie about the status of its investigation of an important national issue (the integrity of the 2020 Presidential election). Lawyers cannot advocate for any outcome based on false statements and they certainly cannot urge others to do so. Respondent persistently and energetically sought to do just that on an important national issue. He should be disbarred as a consequence and to send a message to the rest of the Bar and to the public that this behavior will not be tolerated.

Justice Department Inspector General Claims to Have Lost a Whistleblower Complaint Against Emil Bove

After Senate Republicans confirmed top DOJ official Emil Bove for a lifetime judicial appointment this week, it came to light that the DOJ’s inspector general failed to act on a whistleblower complaint, filed against Bove in early May. Libby Liu, the chief executive of Whistleblower Aid, which represents the whistleblower, told the New York Times she was “stunned,” adding, “Clearly the inspector general failed in their basic function here. If they don’t even open whistle-blower complaints, then what is going on?”

Homeland Security Heresies

Brian Kaylor, an expert on Christian nationalism and an ordained minister, has an excellent post on the Department of Homeland Security’s manipulation of Bible verses in social media posts to glorify its militarized, terrorizing crackdowns on immigrants. One grotesque video shows gun-toting agents in tactical gear storming buildings in nighttime raids. It is accompanied by the King James translation of Proverbs 28:1: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth; but the righteous are bold as a lion.”

Your Questions About the Texas Gerrymandering Scheme, Answered

From the indispensable elections news site Bolts, a reader Q & A with Brennan Center legal counsel Michael Li, about Texas Republicans following Trump’s orders to gerrymander congressional districts to enhance the GOP’s chances of holding the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms. It’s extremely informative.

Appeals Court Skeptical of Trump Tariff Arguments

The full 11-member panel of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit “took turns questioning a top US Justice Department official about Trump’s argument that the nation’s persistent trade deficit qualified as a national emergency under the law, allowing the president to bypass Congress and hit countries across the globe with tariffs,” Bloomberg reports. A decision is expected in weeks, with an appeal to the Supreme Court likely. Meanwhile, Trump went ahead with announcements that he will impose massive tariffs on dozens of countries around the world come August 7, triggering a global stock slump.

Trump Family Corruption Watch

Eric Trump’s holdings in a Bitcoin mining venture formed in March could be worth $367 million in an anticipated initial public offering.

MAGA Podcasts Can’t Stop Talking About the Epstein Files

An analysis by the Wall Street Journal found that right-wing podcasters discussed Jeffrey Epstein in over 3,000 episodes of 125 podcasts this year, and that these discussions “grew more than eightfold in the last three weeks despite Trump’s admonishment that MAGA drop the issue.”

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Is the Government Still Collecting Inflation Data? Well …

Posted on by Josh Marshall

Whether it’s AI or Social Media, for me at least, the routine is pretty similar. I look to see if something seems interesting or interests me. And if it does, I try to reproduce it or verify it with a human brain, i.e., my own. This morning I saw a tweet claiming that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was moving from collecting the pricing information that goes into building government’s canonical inflation numbers (CPI) to relying instead on a higher percentage “imputed” numbers, i.e., estimates. “Estimates” aren’t all bad. A few years back it became a topic of pretty intense partisan warfare with the Census. As I recall it, the Census was combining data collection with statistical models to get more accurate counts for more marginal and transient populations where underreporting is chronic. (As you might imagine, undocumented people aren’t terribly eager to fill out government forms.) In any case, was it really true that BLS is cutting back on data collection?

Actually it is.

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